Black Mexico: Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Race and Nation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Third World Quarterly, 2021
The Mexican government is currently attempting to incorporate Black Mexicans into the national cultural landscape. However, the centring of whiteness through mestizaje limits the possibilities of Black inclusion by continuing to imagine the archetypal Mexican citizen as non-Black. Therefore, a colonial inheritance of racial value continues to frame how blackness can be constituted as part of the contemporary nation. This article argues that while the War for Independence may have allowed for the imagination of a new 'Mexican' , a colonial racial economy continues to endure. This racial economy continues to limit the possibility of citizenship for African descendants in México.
Transnational Immigration Politics in Mexico, 1850-1920
2013
This academic adventure began for me in 1996, and along this long journey I have received tremendous support from many people, who encouraged me to not give up on my goal of earning a doctorate degree in history; despite coming across faculty that tried to dissuade me from going to graduate school, remarking that it would be too expensive and not worth it. Nonetheless, putting that negativity aside, from the University of California, San Diego, I thank Eric Van Young for believing in me and encouraging me not to listen to people who doubted my potential. At San Diego State University, the many letters of recommendation given to me by Paula De Vos and Elizabeth Colwill allowed me to continue to pursue a Ph.D. At the University of Arizona, I have to begin by first thanking my doctoral committee, Kevin Gosner and Martha Few for not only having to read a 260 page first draft version of this dissertation, but my advisor William H. Beezley, for promptly giving me back valuable feedback and suggestions throughout the summer to make the manuscript even better. During my graduate school experience at Arizona, I learned to have a more open mind and to not hesitate to share my ideas. Prior to going to Tucson, I had read an article in U.S. News and World Report's annual report on the best graduate schools in America, and it cautioned incoming graduate students not to openly discuss their research ideas, as dissertation topics had been known to be "stolen." Thus, while in my first research seminar at the university, which happened to be with professor Gosner in the fall of 2006, I explained my research topic to my classmate, Stephen Neufeld, and as a result, only a couple of days later, he informed me that he had come across a U.S. Congressional hearing on a black colonization scheme in Mexico from 1895, saying
Chasing Blackness: Re-investing value and Mexico's changing racial economy
2013
This dissertation explores how race is mobilized by "those on the bottom" within the confines of the current multicultural political arena dictated by the Mexican state as a means of access to national citizenship(s). This work adds an explicit cultural, social, and political element to the notion of "racial economy". I argue that race, ethnicity, and culture have an historic value that helps to define their current value within the neo-liberal multicultural state and can therefore be traded in a limited number of ways. In this way, the logic of difference, based on colonial logics of race and ethnicity, dictates particular potentials and perspectives on the use and value of race and ethnicity as a cultural, social, and political commodity. These colonial logics continue to inform state sanctioned strategies for the official recognition of difference within the Mexican nation state. However, this dissertation argues that these logics are explicitly challenged by grass root approaches to recognition and representation as witnessed by local activism and the tensions between state officials and community organizers over the means of production for selfrepresentation. A phenomenon that I refer to as "implication", suggests that invocations of particular histories and social phenomena, such as racism, implicate particular racial/ethnic groups in the deliberate construction of the racial past and present, and therefore can define government approaches to citizenship as the government only half-heartedly embraces the true historical treatment of its marginalized populations. The issue of choosing a social identity, then, is paramount, as all racial terms embody particular social histories and can act as mnemonic devices that trigger a number of accepted or contested social histories. For this reason, it is also argued that the tensions between government, academics, and activists over linguistic and symbolic representations of race are more than tiffs over politically correct nomenclature, and should be read as serious conflicts over social/historical representation and the power to selfiii identify. Lastly, I focus on the role that conflicting "racial economies" at the U.S./Mexico border have on processes of racial formation/transformation. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Hemispheric and Transborder Perspectives: Racialization of Mexicans through Time
Konturen
This article embeds a discussion of contemporary transborder communities—communities spread out in multiple locations in the U.S. and Mexico—in the history of U.S.-Mexico relations as seen through the colonial and contemporary mapping of space, place, people, race, and ethnicity both visually through the creation of maps and then metaphorically through U.S. immigration policy in the 19th and 20th centuries. I argue that the concept of “transborder” which can include borders of coloniality, ethnicity, race, nation, and region can help us to illuminate U.S.-Mexico relationships through time and the complexities of the racialization of Mexicans in the U.S.
Mexican Nationalisms, Southern Racisms: Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the U.S. South, 1908–1939
American Quarterly, 2008
The early twentieth century brought transformative Mexican migrations to places from Texas to Alaska, Michigan to California, and the South was no exception. Examining the case of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the South from 1908 to 1939, this essay shows how international migration, in this case between the United States and Mexico, has shaped the racial ideologies of nations and societies at both ends of migration streams. It traces the arrival of Mexican immigrants to two Southern locations, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, and discusses their initial experiences of race and class there. It then focuses on the middle- and upper-class community surrounding Mexico’s New Orleans consulate, as well as the self-appointed leadership among poor Mexican sharecroppers in Gunnison, Mississippi, to illuminate the distinctly Mexican strategies which Mexicans of all social classes pursued in their quest to attain and retain white status in the U.S. South. In the early twentieth century U.S. South, there were no Mexican Americans who could call upon U.S. citizenship or claims to be “Caucasian” under the law, nor organizers drawing Mexicans into class-based politics. There, Mexicans’ sole cultural and political claims took the form of Mexico-directed activism, through which the racial ideologies of both immigrants and Mexican government bureaucrats had a discernible impact upon the color line’s shape and foundations. Conversely, it was in the South that Mexican government representatives most directly confronted the black-white eugenic binary of U.S. white supremacy, and did so without the support of U.S.-based institutions or groups. This article argues that during the decade following the Mexican revolution, Mexican immigrants and bureaucrats in the South emphasized Mexico’s pre-revolutionary tradition of cultural whitening, avoiding the official post-revolutionary celebration of race-mixing, or mestizaje. In so doing, they successfully elided questions of eugenic race in their negotiation of the color line. They eventually secured Mexicans’ acceptance as white, a trajectory more closely mirroring national trends for European, rather than Mexican immigrants in the same period.